Festival fraught with war plots

`American Tet' is subtle as napalm

July 28, 2005|By MICHAEL KILIAN

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — The war in Iraq has begun to seep into American theater.

Each year, the Contemporary American Theater Festival here presents four new and usually cutting-edge works, often including world premieres. This summer, three of the four offerings have to do with the Iraq war or the GWOT (Pentagonese for "Global War on Terrorism," of which the Pentagon views the Iraq struggle an integral part).

The most attention-getting is Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," a biting polemic against what is advertised as the Bush-Cheney administration's rampant militarism. One of the theater's two world premieres this year is Melinda Lopez's "Serena Flew," which juxtaposes the U.S. military climate with life in Castro's Cuba in the 1960s.

The most shrill and strident, and therefore most politically interesting, is Lydia Stryk's "American Tet," another world premiere that treats the Iraq war much as "Macbird," "Oh, What a Lovely War" and "Platoon" did Vietnam.

One family's plight

The allusions to Vietnam in "American Tet" are numerous and its overall approach about as subtle as napalm. Stryk views both conflicts through the prism of a single military family, whose Job-like sufferings from the woes of war fill a pretty lengthy menu.

Dad Jim Krombacher is a retired career soldier now debilitated by the Agent Orange he was exposed to in Vietnam. He doesn't much care for what used to be derided as "peacecreeps," but secretly has begun to agree with them as concerns Iraq.

Son Danny is an erstwhile, gung-ho enlisted member of the all-volunteer military coming home for a respite from Iraq. He feels certain he will be killed when he goes back and is increasingly reluctant to return.

Daughter Amy has been so radicalized by her brother's plight and the war in general she has become a dangerous revolutionary in the mold of the Vietnam-era Weathermen.

Angela, a neighbor's daughter close to Danny, also joined up and was sent to Iraq, losing a leg, an eye and her entire face in a bombing attack.

There's a Vietnamese waitress befriended by the Krombachers, whose mind remains filled with memories of assorted American atrocities, which she sees repeated in Iraq and attributes to American arrogance and greed.

Only mother Elaine, a loyal military wife, continues chirpy and chipper, helping other wives with the problems of separation and long deployments. Oddly, the author even drags in Elaine's father, who served in the German Army in World War II and is now delusional.

Stryk, who grew up in DeKalb but is based in New York, got the idea for "American Tet" attending anti-war rallies and meetings in the latter place that included former and current military as speakers.

"I was just so overwhelmed by the Vietnam vets and military families and Iraq soldiers who wanted to talk," said Stryk, whose, father served as a forward artillery observer on Okinawa during World War II. "They were so authentic in the strength of their convictions on when you go to war and the costs of when you go to war. I wanted to enter their world, and it seemed to me this was the best and only way to talk about this war."

When it was noted that few military families suffer all or most of the ills she visits on this one, Stryk responded that the ills are representative of those suffered by a large number of military families in this conflict.

"They [the Krombachers] are Everyman in that sense and yet it's not that unusual an experience as you might think," she said. "These are the stories coming in. We live in a world in which we raise our boys to be soldiers and the families sit at home waiting for them and they follow the orders. That's what happens generation after generation after generation. It may be necessary, but it has terrible costs, so I think we need to be very careful about when we go to war."

It was also noted that many soldiers serving in Iraq have quite different views than hers and that she allows them no voice here.

`A bad man'

"I think the politics of that idea is that Saddam Hussein was a bad man," she replied. "[But] we have to find other ways to handle that because our response is not working. We've created a quagmire. It's a seminal event for our generation like Vietnam was."

Theater critics are irrelevant with plays like this. What counts is the reactions of the audiences.

"We debated whether to have an intermission because it gives people a chance to walk out," Stryk said.

Because the play would have been a trifle long without it, the intermission stayed.

"In three performances, just seven walked out," she said. "At one, a family walked by me and the father was saying, `I hated this play, but it made my heart thump. I never heard anyone accuse Americans of torture before.' Another woman said, `My son is a Marine, and this play is garbage.'"

A number of people came up to Stryk after the play, including a vet who had become a state legislator.

"He said, `You know, I'm a patriot. It was the biggest honor for me to serve this country,'" she said, "and yet he was having the strongest reaction against this war and didn't think my play was against the military."

And another woman said, "This is a play about how it hurts to hurt people."